Jessica grates the just-picked zucchini from her garden. She chops cilantro and minces ginger, sprinkles in chickpea flour. A cast iron pan bubbles with oil, and she gingerly drops a dollop of green into the pan.

Her home in Oakland -- which she rents with a carpenter and a chef -- is airy and open, with exposed beams and floor-length windows that look out over a lush vegetable garden. The house is heated by radiant heat (hot water pipes zigzagging under the concrete floor), and almost all of the building materials were salvaged and recycled.

Jessica (not her real name) lives what some might consider the perfect alternative lifestyle. She makes enough money to pay for rent and food (from the farmer's market) by teaching classes at the Solar Living Institute and selling her self-published zine about alternative fuel. She grows much of her own food and raises chickens and bees in her backyard. As a child, her family life centered around growing food and cooking meals together. Her parents never emphasized money.

She hasn't strayed far from her upbringing. When asked about her views on money, she said: "It's better to be happy than to worry about your credit card bill or working a lot."

One of the key points of being happy, for Jessica, is to bank at Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union. Jessica's made it a point to convert her friends to using credit unions, which are nonprofit banks. While she flipped the zucchini pancakes, she laid out her best argument, "I say to people: So you shop at a farmer's market. You use alternative fuel or bike or take public transportation. But you still bank at Bank of America?" She laughed at the paradox of the small- is-beautiful crowd supporting a global corporation.

I shifted in my chair. My main account is at Washington Mutual. I support my local farmer, but I had never thought about banking as a political act. I've always picked banks based on how close they are to my house or work.

We dug into lunch: zucchini pancakes, a crusty baguette, homemade marmalade and some farmstead cheese. Jessica hasn't always banked at credit unions. Her parents, a public defender and a secretary, though politically involved, didn't belong to a credit union, and so Jessica hadn't given a lot of thought to banking institutions.

That changed after she left her home state of Michigan to go to school in Indiana. As a student, she worked for the library, where the workers were paid low salaries compared to similar jobs in town. "We were making poverty wages, and though I could live off it, I didn't have kids to support," Jessica said. After a long fight, the university workers unionized and negotiated better wages. Seeing this happen changed Jessica's relationship to banking. She wanted to put her money back into the community, and a credit union allowed her to do that.

"With banks, it's a business and all your money goes to make someone you don't know rich -- but with credit unions, all the money goes back into the community," Jessica explained. "It's people banding together to share the abundance."

Credit unions -- also called cooperative banks or people's banks -- have origins in Europe. They were first started by German farmers in the 1860s who felt private banks were charging unfair fees. These rural people pooled money together in order to make loans within their tight-knit community. In North America, the idea of credit unions was first embraced by Canadians -- ever more socialist-minded than their neighbors to the south. Only much later, in 1909, did the first U.S. credit union surface in Massachusetts. These days in the United States, there are over 8,000 credit unions; 536 of them are in California.

Although investing in her community is Jessica's raison d'etre, she has an arsenal of compelling reasons to bank with a credit union. Jessica finds herself trying to change her friends' minds about where they bank with her other big gun: interest rates. "I used to do this thing where I would ask my friends who use regular banks what their savings interest rate was," Jessica paused before taking a bite. "And mine was always higher."

I had to admit something to Jessica then: I don't even know what my interest rate is.

"Pretty much across the board, we beat banks," said Katye Long of Credit Union National Association when I called her to ask about credit union rates. Lower rates for loans, and higher rates for savings accounts. Long urged me to check out Datatrac, a feature on the group's Web site which compares interest rates for banks versus credit unions. Credit unions, according to Datatrac in late August, have better rates for everything but for 30 year fixed mortgage loans.

"It's one of those cases of don't believe what you think," Jessica said. One would think the big corporate banks would offer better rates than a dinky community bank. But credit unions are not-for-profit, so any 'profit' made is passed on to the members.

She points out that private banks usually pay a board of directors to oversee global investments. Credit unions, however, have a board of directors selected from the community. Any member can go to the meetings, and have input on how the money will be spent.

This is important to Jessica, whose lifestyle revolves around small, direct interactions with her community. Investing her money in the local bank, then, comes as second nature.

She points out one downside with credit unions: there are fewer ATMs. Jessica found herself taking money out of the most convenient ATMs -- usually from big banks like Wells Fargo or Bank of America. She distinctly remembers realizing that the $2 fee would go straight to the corporation she was trying to avoid.

"I thought, I'm not going to support those banks. So now I just take out $100 at a time from my bank," Jessica said. Though her credit union has an ATM, she goes into the bank to withdraw her money. She likes talking to the tellers and getting to know them. Jessica has gotten good at budgeting, too -- that $100 lasts for a whole month. "I trained myself that cash is not free money," Jessica said, "I had to learn how to budget." Jessica feels like she changed a negative into a positive.

For dessert, Jessica opens a jar of homemade stewed plums. They were picked and jarred a few blocks from her house. We swirl honey from her backyard beehives over the plums. She explained that the customer service at credit unions is the icing on the cake for her.

"[At my bank the tellers] care about you, the member," Jessica said. "They're being nice because that's the whole point of their being." She points out that when she used to go to a for-profit bank she felt like she was judged by how much money she had, not by who she was as a person.

For example, when Jessica took out a loan several years ago to buy an electric vehicle, getting a loan from her bank was no problem, and she loved the individualized attention she got. Even when it was discovered that the car fit under a motorcycle category -- which would usually increase the interest rate on the loan -- her bank went out of its way to provide the loan at the car rate. "I know if I banked somewhere else, they would've just been like, tough luck."

"Surveys show people are unaware," said CUNA's Long. "First off, when credit unions started, they were centered around a work location or a church, so most people don't realize that they qualify. But the fact is, most people in the U.S. do qualify to join at least one credit union."

After my visit with Jessica, my utter lack of banking savvy became apparent to me. I checked out my bank, WaMu, to figure out my interest rates. On a platinum checking account, the rate is 0.10 percent, but I would have to pay a $20 fee if my account dipped below $10,000 (hence platinum). For the standard checking (the one I have), there is no interest offered. As for savings accounts in California, WaMu offers 0.25 percent.

I compared those rates with a credit union which I would qualify to join: Cal State 9, a local credit union for University of California students and alumni. I found that it offers twice the rate of WaMu: 0.5 percent on savings accounts with a balance of $10 or more, 0.75 percent if the balance is over $5,000. CalState 9 even pays interest (0.10 percent) on checking accounts that maintain a balance of only $1,000.

It started to seem like a no-brainer for me, and in fact, for a lot of people. For others, there might be some downsides to banking at a credit union. One is that credit unions don't usually service corporations. Businesses, unless they are cooperatives, usually aren't allowed to open bank accounts at credit unions. Another potential problem is that if you can only qualify for a small credit union, there's a chance that you won't get a full range of services like small business loans or mortgages. If you qualify to join a larger, multi-branch credit union, though, you have will no problem accessing these services.

But I kept thinking there must be other reasons people prefer a private bank over a credit union, so I called WaMu to get their perspective. After being put on hold for 10 minutes, someone finally responded: Call the 800 number.

"But I bank there," I said, "What are the pros of WaMu? Why shouldn't I switch over?"

"You need to call the national office," I was told. "We can't comment to the media."

So I called national and left a detailed voice mail but still haven't heard back.

After seeing the numbers and not getting a good answer from WaMu, I'm fairly certain that after my next paycheck, I'm going to switch over to a credit union. A few weeks after our interview, I ran into Jessica and told her that I'm seriously considering opening up a credit union account.

"Finally," she said, and laughed. Another convert under her belt.

A citizen of Oakland, Novella Carpenter reports on food, farming, and culture. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, NPR, Washingtonpost.com, and various alt weeklies. Her memoir, "FarmCity: The Education of an Urban Farmer" is forthcoming from Penguin. She keeps a blog about urban farming at: yourcityfarmer.blogspot.com